Black city hall, black police chief and mostly black cops, and black-landlords colluding to push working class African Americans out in favor of newer, whiter, more affluent residents? Sound familiar? You might be living under the new urban regime....

“Michelle Rhee may yet pay for her the damage she has inflicted on society and its children.” The former DC schools superintendent and privatization poster girl has been exposed to charges of fraud, along with her sister in crime, former Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall. The real criminal enterprise is codified in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, headed up by the Bush and Obama gangs.

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Atlanta's black former school superintendent and 34 other black teachers and administrators have been indicted for “racketeering” in a cheating scandal. Why aren't others like former DC Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and her team indicted? Should we be rallying the racial wagons around Dr. Hall and the other 34? No way.

When the issue was opposing Jim Crow, the black community in places like Atlanta was united. But after a generation of black faces in high places, the black political class in cites like Atlanta has less in common with ordinary African Americans than ever before. The next big issue on the horizon --- transit privatization, will open a vast chasm between our black elite and the rest of us.

A national movement to save public education is coming to life, in the face of a decades-long bipartisan campaign to discredit, de-fund, destabilized and destroy public education. President Bush's Education Secretary said teachers unions were terrorist organizations. Obama's man Arne Duncan believes Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to education in New Orleans. Is it time yet to dump, and to dump on Arne Duncan?

Hailed by “smart growth” advocates around the country, the Atlanta BeltLine, is a massive & racist gentrification scheme funded by diverting billions out of Atlanta's Public School budget to banksters and crooked developers. But those billions aren't enough. To bail out the BeltLine, the governor and Atlanta's black mayor want to levy a one-cent sales tax on Atlanta for streetcars and light rail most of black Atlanta will never ride, for Jim Crow streetcars, when black Atlanta neighborhoods don't even get 24 hour bus or train service. Can the black misleadership class really pull this off?

Why are police across the country arresting and dispersing occupation sites? And why is the Black Misleadership Class, and its black Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed threatened by the occupy movement? Why did Atlanta send copters, hundreds of police, and spend at least $800,000 to breakup Occupy Atlanta? Where will it assemble next? Can homeless Atlanta and Occupy Atlanta work together, and if they can, will mayor Reed and his friends in the one percent like that even less?

Allegations that Bishop Eddie Long lured young Black men to become his sexual playthings should come as no surprise, since his brand of “faith pimping spiritual ministry translates into emotional manipulation, psychological control, and sexual exploitation.” Long, a “self-proclaimed ‘spiritual daddy’ to a nationwide army of ‘wayward’ sons,” is the inevitable offspring of religious patriarchy and robber baron politics.

36 years of black Atlanta mayors have given birth to a thriving and empowered class of black managers, attorneys and contractors. But even after moving tens of thousands of poor blacks who once lived in public housing to areas beyond the city limits, fully one third of black Atlanta remains below the poverty level, making Atlanta number 5 in black poverty among the 40 largest US cities, according to current US Census data. So have the generation of black mayors and the crew that brought them in really done African Americans that much good?

Much of what passes for Black leadership no longer represents African American political interests or opinion, having broken from their progressive mass moorings under the lure of corporate money and “faith-based” government bribes. Black politicians dance to the tunes of Big Business campaign contributors, while many Black preachers “ape the undemocratic and bigoted worst” of their white Christian counterparts. The ambitions of both the secular and religious hustlers converge in Memphis Tennessee, where Black preachers fan the flames of homophobia to elect their chosen candidate, and in Georgia, where an elected Black county executive is poised to run for Cynthia McKinney’s old seat in Congress with the help of real estate interests and money-grubbing mega-preachers, thus threatening to push the Congressional Black Caucus further to the Right. The Black Georgia incumbent congressman’s crime: he’s a Buddhist.

Black-led and proudly black ruled for a generation, and home to more black millionaires than anyplace else besides the nation's capital, Atlanta also leads the nation in the percentage of its children in poverty. What does this say about the status of "Black Mecca"?

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